He that is good for making excuses, is seldom good for anything else. –Benjamin Franklin
Dear Parents, Siblings, Friends, Neighbors, Spouses, Fiancees, and Ex-Fiancees of my students:
While I appreciate the concern all of you feel, from time to time, about the grades, attendance, and overall class status of the students in question, please allow me to remind you that the law prohibits me from giving you the slightest detail of his/her standing in my class.
No, I cannot tell you whether or not a student was present on any given day.
No, I cannot tell you whether or not a student is passing or failing.
No, I cannot tell you what assignments a student is missing, and even if I could it wouldn’t matter because at the college level, there are no make-ups.
No, I cannot give you the assignment due next Monday.
I can give this information only to the student himself/herself, and I never do that over the phone because how, then, would I know it’s not YOU instead of the student?
Thanks for asking.
Sincerely,
Insensitive Professor
P.S. Yes, I understand that you are paying all of this student’s fees, tuition, and books, but I still can’t tell you.
P. P.S. I work really hard to make my lessons as interesting and memorable as I possibly can, but if a student is not there, how can he/she benefit from it? Yes, we covered Chapter 28, but we did far, far more than that. I guess you had to be there. . . .
==
80% of success is showing up. –Woody Allen (not that he is anybody to imitate!) (Ick factor: 99.9%)
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. -Ovid
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. –Einstein
You can buy people’s time; you can buy their physical presence at a given place; you can even buy a measured number of their skilled muscular motions per hour. But you cannot buy enthusiasm. You cannot buy loyalty. You cannot buy the devotion of hearts, minds, or souls. You must earn these. –Clarence Francis
Apparently a new galaxy is being formed or something. But what it is, they have discovered a huge cloud of dust there. And scientists believe if they could look and see under the dust, they would find an enormous exercise bicycle. –Bill Maher
It is the essence of our educational system that whatever part of the institution is not run by the inmates is reserved for the parents of the inmates. –Murray Kempton
We create our fate every day. . . most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior. –Henry Miller
Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you. –Frank Tyger
I can’t choose how I feel, but I can choose what I do about it. –Andy Rooney
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that; for it is true: we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct. –Benjamin Franklin
He that is good for making excuses, is seldom good for anything else. –Benjamin Franklin
It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellence lies before us. –Isaac D’Israeli
A fool has no dialogue within himself; the first thought carries him without the reply of a second. –Lord Halifax
There are more fools than knaves int he world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon. –Samuel Butler
Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through. Face it! –Joseph Conrad
The reason most people fail instead of succeed is that they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment. –Anon.
The world can never nail down genius, but it can crucify it. –Puzant Kevork Thomajan
When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. –Jonathan Swift
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. –Elbert Hubbard
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius. — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
No generalization is wholly true, not even this one. –Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
There is no self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others. –George Shinn
Good and bad men are each less so than they seem. –Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Though we speak with the tongues of men and angels, and give our bodies to be burned. . . if we are irritable or hard to live with, it all counts for nothing. –Anon
People with limited imaginations find it hard to imagine that anyone else has an imagination. Therefore, they must think that everything they read in some way happened. –John Irving
In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different. –Coco Chanel
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. –Susan Ertz
To do easily what’s difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius. –Frederic Amiel
Genius ain’t anything more than elegant common sense. –Josh Billings.
The greatest sin in the world is ignorance in motion. –Jan Aird
Help us, God, and give us light so that we don’t stand in our own way; let us do from morning till night what should be done; and give us clear ideas of the consequences of our actions. –Goethe
Rooney Ain't The Only One Sh, Sh, Shakin'
I didn’t need an alarm clock to wake me up this morning.
How coincidental that I lectured my students on the New Madrid Fault Line just last week, and emphasized to them for the five billionth time that nothing important exists only within the four walls of a classroom, after which a young man scoffed at this “useless information” and asked me, for the seventy-billionth time in my career, why he had to learn all this stupid stuff.
I just KNOW that his first thought this morning was “Holy Shit, we’re all going to die!” “Wow, my professor knew what she was talking about!”
We’re all okay here, and thank you all so much for asking. I appreciate your concern, and I hope all of you are okay, too.
P.S. The title? It’s a song; didn’t you know? “. . . it’s not normal, but what is normal. . . ?”
I Wish I Had Known My Grandmother
This is my maternal grandmother, holding my mother’s older sister, who is my Cousin C’s mother.
Mom told me that Mamaw was visiting one of her sisters in Indianapolis, and they took her to a studio to have the baby’s picture taken. When the photographer saw how young the baby was, he told Mamaw that she would have to hold her.
Mamaw protested that she wasn’t dressed or groomed to have her picture taken, but finally gave in and did it.
None of us cousins ever knew our grandmother, not really. She had a stroke when she was in her forties and after that, she was, well, perhaps “barking mad” is a bit extreme, but she certainly wasn’t herself. The strong, smart woman she really was, was gone: the woman who refused to allow her militant dictatorial mother-in-law to name HER babies as the old woman had all her other grandchildren; the resourceful, creative woman who took her children berry-picking and “let” them eat cobbler for dinner when in fact she was at desperation’s door because there was no food in the house and the berry-picking was the only way to get some kind of food; the determined, hardworking woman who took care of four kids all by herself during the week and saw her railroading husband (no, not THAT kind of railroading!) only on weekends; the laughing, intelligent woman who could recite all kinds of poetry; and, a little after the stroke, with one of her last few lucid moments, the brave woman who told my father to take my mother out of the house and marry her before mom sacrificed herself and stayed single to take care of her little brothers because it was obvious that Mamaw’s stroke had taken her intellect and social graces and flushed them down the toilet. . . this is the part of Mamaw none of us cousins ever knew.
However, the woman who managed to say whatever she wanted to say, no matter how bizarre her grammar had become, who managed to hold herself and her house together when her husband was crushed by a falling house, and who could recite the alphabet backwards to make her grandchildren laugh, the funny woman who almost choked to death laughing whenever she heard Mahalia Jackson sing when Channel Four signed off at midnight (many apologies to Mahalia Jackson fans; to Mamaw, her singing just seemed funny.) the kind woman who asked C and me every Saturday morning, “Carol, Janie, breakfast what?” and then fixed it for us. . . we knew this woman well. We stayed with her every weekend we could, mostly because we were largely unsupervised and could do anything we wanted, and partly because I think we knew, even in our unbridled running around the neighborhood and staying up after midnight, and watching forbidden scary movies, and fixing french fries for every meal, and poking fun at Mamaw’s O/C compulsions to walk around and touch everything in a room, that if push came to shove, Mamaw would somehow take care of us in spite of that stroke. The woman she really was, was still in there somewhere.
I think she looks beautiful in that picture. I wish I could have known that woman. Everybody says she was fantastic.
